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[martinuzz]

Dunno, Kurds will probably be pretty content if they can have their own country.

Problem is, they can't. America is allowing Turks to bomb the crap out of the Kurds as we speak, both in Syria as well as in Iraq (yesterday Turkey bombed Kurds in Iraq)
The only thing this can lead to, is anti-american sentiment with a betrayed ally.

[mainiac]

IDK, the kurds seem to still like us and none of this is particularly new, it's just episodes of a long standing saga.  If they were gonna get radicalized I think they would have done it 20 years ago.

[martinuzz]

but it is new. Turkey went from artillery shelling a few PKK kurds that got to close to the Turkish border per year, to actually invading Syria with ground troops, daily bombing and artillery shelling them, and flying out all the way to Iraq to bomb non-PKK, YPG Kurds there.

America made a 180 within a week, going from 'please don't endanger US troops that support YPG / stop bombing YPG' to 'oh okay Turkey, it's allright, go ahead and genocide the Kurds, as long as you also fight IS'.

I can't imagine that not going to have a blowback in anti-american sentiment.

[Baffler]

Are they flying sorties in Rojava proper and Iraq too? I thought they'd just gone into Syria to replace the YPG west of the Euphrates.

Well look at that. At least they're fighting ISIS too.

[Strife26]

The US has a deep seated requirement to stab someone like the Kurds in the back every few years. Nothing new.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The US spent basically the whole Cold War passively helping Turkey try to exterminate the Kurds (what people don't remember is that the modern founder of Kurdish nationalism was an out and out communist until the Cold War ended).

In this new era of no friends, no enemies, only economy who even knows if the Kurds will tolerate the US?

[martinuzz]

Quite aware of that. There's lots of Kurd (and Turkish) communists in the Netherlands who fled from Turkey when Turkey banned communism 20-30 years ago.

[mainiac]

but it is new.

But it's not.

[PTTG??]

"Trump: I've built a great company."
Sure you have. Out of parts pre-assembled in China.

[Frumple]

Naaah. If that'd happened it probably would have done better than it has :V

That's good ol' american puffery right there, not anything imported from china. _{Europe or the russian part of asia, maybe, but not china.}

E: Though I now have the most amazing mental image of china offering trump asylum after his supporters turn on him for not pulling through on any number of issues...

[Flying Dice]

Wouldn't be anything new for him, either. It was Chinese firms/individuals that bailed him out of at least one of his bankruptcies. Anyone voting for Trump on the (asinine) principle of "Good businessman = good political leader" has pretty clearly never read a word about his history as a businessman. All he's good at is finding new suckers.

[Sheb]

Noted warlock Nate Silver

Noted indeed.

Needless to say, I don't have much faith in any odds he's providing. Petty as it is, I still can't help but chuckle when I see him referred to as Nate Bronze.

Minor quibble, but I don't think it's entirely fair to blame him for Kasich and Cruz stepping down after Indiana when they were both vowing to fight to the convention back then.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The hate-on Trump supporters have developed for Nate Radium is completely irrational. Five Thirty-Eight aggregates historic and polling data to make predictions. These predictions tend to be shockingly accurate (99/100 state picks in the last two Presidential elections) because they are purged of human bias through this methodology, and in terms of probability the most likely thing to happen will most often be the thing that does happen.

The only reason he's been targeted is because he's a respected pollster who didn't buy into the Trump hype and accurately, yes, accurately said that Trump had low odds of winning the primary. Which was completely true. If there's any cognitive fallacy that really grinds my gears, it's the idea that probability and accuracy are opposed to one another. Unlikely things happen every day, and they have to happen, by definition.

Every event in the thermodynamic void of our reality must have all possibilities divided into percentages that ultimately add up to 100%. If something has a one in a million chance of happening then that one is required to happen alongside the other nine hundred-thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine. If it doesn't, then those weren't the actual odds. You don't get to turn around and say "Ah-ha! Conspiracy! Lies! Idiocy! The alleged "one" is clearly the most likely event to happen, because it did happen! Get fucked haters!". That is not how anything works.

Trump was among the least likely winners of the primary; that he won the primary does not alter this. If the cold indifference of the cosmos crushes us underfoot and Trump wins 320 electoral votes it is not proof of anything either, except that fire and darkness shall reign triumphant over the hearts of man for FOUR MORE YEARS

[mainiac]

Former US ambassador to Russia, current shill:
https://twitter.com/McFaul/status/773566311939006464

[Max™]

I don't think probabilities work exactly like that, MSH, you're describing without clarifying priors. "If soandso is something, then the odds of otherthing are x per y events" is different from "if y events take place, then the odds of otherthing are 100%" and different from a range of other types of probabilistic statements of odds.

In 100 trillion trillion years the odds of me flipping a coin non-stop and having it land on edge, begin rotating rapidly, and transforming into a singing and dancing frog wearing a tophat may be nonzero, but that prior assumption implies the universe will last for 100 trillion trillion years and that I will be flipping a coin the whole time and that my understanding of the physics involved are sound.